CNN is far behind FOX News and MSNBC in the ratings. It averages around half a million viewers in prime time and it recently hit a 7-year low in the demo.

So it was the perfect time for Chris Wallace to leave FOX News for CNN+.

Some might have thought that Wallace was leaving to fill Chris Cuomo’s slot at CNN. No such luck, though without Cuomo the failing news network’s ratings have crashed to new lows.

But crashing to new lows is the default story at CNN.

CNN Airport, its captive audience operation, shut down earlier this year. And CNN isn’t far behind. CNN+ is the network’s bet that enough people will pay 6 bucks a month to watch it.

CNN's effort to launch CNN+, a paid streaming service, at a time when its core ratings are crashing is confusing observers who wonder why the news network thinks people will pay for CNN when they won't even watch it for free.

CNN President Jeff Zucker billed CNN+ as being for "CNN superfans, news junkies and fans of quality non-fiction programming.”

The existence of CNN superfans is as improbable as Bigfoot and UFOs. No one has ever spotted a CNN superfan in the wild and not even the most exotic zoos have them in stock.

News junkies certainly exist, but they don’t bother with CNN which doesn’t offer news.

All that’s left is the “quality non-fiction programming” which is a euphemism for infotainment, cooking shows, travel shows, and whatever else you can find on PBS, Discovery, and a host of similar cable channels that, unlike CNN, people will actually watch on their own time.

But CNN is short on options. Like the Washington Post and the New York Times, and other media outlets that monetized hatred for Trump, the Biden era was a rude awakening. After killing the golden goose, they’re trying to figure out how to market themselves without him.

Unlike the Post, which is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and the New York Times, which is a family business, nobody really wants CNN. AT&T, which got CNN as part of a package deal, decided to roll the whole thing into the Warner Brothers Discovery megacompany. With its new motto of, "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of", there’s no real room for CNN in the company.

The last thing anyone associates with CNN is the stuff that dreams are made of.

CNN+ is a frantic effort to pivot back to Jeff Zucker’s earlier plans to transform the news network into infotainment. And CNN+ is focusing on having Chris Wallace interview and bore assorted personalities, while actors Stanley Tucci and Eva Longoria wander around Italy and Spain.

But that just raises the question of why anyone would pay $5.99 for a mediocre copy of PBS.

The prospect of CNN+ becoming a success is unlikely, but the more likely situation is that it will still cannibalize the news network to become part of an HBO Max streaming bundle. CNN will still be around as a cable news network, but as cord cutters increasingly dump their subscriptions, the news network will disappear leaving the CNN+ brand in the HBO Max empire.

It’s a humiliating end for CNN. And a thoroughly deserved one.

A CNN executive described CNN+ as “the single biggest launch that CNN has had since Ted Turner launched the network in June of 1980." The comparison isn’t accidental. CNN+ is meant to be the next era of CNN, and to eventually replace it when it dies its natural death on cable.

The 24/7 cable news network concept was exciting when it first debuted. By the time that CNN dumbed it down to talking heads yammering at each other, the news part was deader than dead. And while that’s true of much of the media, the selling point of constant cable news was its ability to report live on breaking events. 24/7 narrative is much less exciting than 24/7 news especially in the age of social media when 24/7 narrative is more conveniently packaged.

And more democratic.

If CNN had focused on hard news, it might be in a better position today. Having traded news for narrative, it’s now trading narrative for infotainment. And it says everything about Chris Wallace that he left FOX News not for CNN’s news division, but for its infotainment streaming app where he can appear alongside old episodes of Anthony Bourdain only to have the latter beat him every time.

CNN+ intends to blur the line between news and entertainment, but there’s not much news left. And when people think of entertainment, the last thing that comes to anyone’s mind is CNN.

Having failed at news, CNN will go on to fail at entertainment.

CNN’s decline and fall will eventually be shared by much of the news media which will either become the vanity properties of billionaires, be transformed into non-profits, or abandon even the pretense of providing news coverage. Network news will follow cable news into oblivion. And, unlike CNN, NBC News, ABC News, and CBS News won’t even live on as infotainment.

It’s hard to know whether that’s better or worse.

CNN, like the rest of the media, spent too many years lying to Americans to ever be trusted. And the 20% of the country that shares its views already has too many media outlets competing for its business. The other 80% will hardly even notice that it’s gone. A news network that once had a stranglehold on the American public has lost its authority and even its airport business.

Now it’ll be little more than another app hoping someone will pay 6 bucks for a membership.

4,901 more people were murdered last year than in 2019. The 30% increase in murders during the year of Black Lives Matter and criminal justice reform was catastrophic. And it’s not over.

With the early numbers coming in, over a dozen cities broke their murder records in 2021. Cities across California are continuing to show double digit increases. Philly broke past 500 murders and in response Soros DA Larry Krasner, whom many blame for the crime wave, assured tourists that everything was fine and they should feel safe coming to the City of Brotherly Love.

"We don't have a crisis of lawlessness. We don't have a crisis of crime. We don't have a crisis of violence,” Krasner, newly reelected with a mandate to keep giving criminals a pass, insisted.

That was too much for even Philly’s Democrat establishment.

"It takes a certain audacity of ignorance and white privilege to say that right now," former Mayor Michael Nutter blasted Krasner, "I have to wonder what kind of messed up world of white wokeness Krasner is living in to have so little regard for human lives lost, many of them Black and brown, while he advances his own national profile as a progressive district attorney."

"I’d like to ask Krasner: How many more Black and brown people, and others, would have to be gunned down in our streets daily to meet your definition of a 'crisis?'"

Krasner belatedly apologized, after critics, many of them, like Nutter, black, attacked him for gaslighting them, insisting that he had just said “some inarticulate things”. Why did Krasner think he could offer up a crazy lie like that? He had just won his reelection race by 69% to 31%.

The proponents of the leftist pro-crime policies that led to this nightmare keep telling crazy lies.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that, “A lot of these allegations of organized retail theft are not actually panning out.”

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki falsely argued that the pandemic was the "a root cause" of the crime wave.

The legalization of theft, the elimination of bail, the revolving door arrests and releases of criminals, the mass jailbreak of violent felons and gang members to “protect them” from the pandemic, reduction in sentences, diversion programs, refusals to prosecute certain offenses, police defunding, and the rest of the catalog of criminal justice reform are the real root causes.

In typical leftist fashion, a radical transformation was enacted through a set of policies disguised as reforms based on an even more radical understanding of how society should work. And, much as with critical race theory or wealth redistribution, we’ve been bombarded with pop propaganda, but virtually no discussion of what the underlying ideology behind it believes.

Criminal justice reform was based on the conviction that crime was due to social inequity, that criminals were innocent victims of an uncaring society, that the police were the latest incarnation of slave catchers, that prisons were the new slavery, and that crime prevention was racist.

Pro-crime ideologues argued for legalizing property crimes since property was theft, and for substituting restorative justice therapy sessions for prison sentences for rapists and killers. They called for abolishing police and prisons because once society is transformed, there will be no more crime because the root cause of crime isn’t individual choice, but systemic racism.

This isn’t some fringe idea by a few nuts. It’s what the Squad believes. That’s why Rep. Tlaib introduced a bill that called for freeing all federal prisoners. It’s what key elected officials in cities like New York City, Minneapolis, and Chicago used as their guiding light when advancing the disastrous policies that wrecked their respective cities.

And yet the media has offered virtually no exploration of these beliefs to mainstream audiences.

Instead the media lied about the most basic things like the meaning of “defund the police”, denying that it meant the elimination of police departments, and justifying assorted “abolitionist” measures like opening up prisons as one-time responses to the pandemic. Even now the media continues echoing the false claims of the Democrats that the crime wave is a pandemic crisis.

And that’s a lie.

The crime wave has followed political patterns. That’s why commercial burglaries and gang murders are up while rape is down. Those crimes that Democrats still take seriously, like rape, are not in crisis mode. It’s those crimes that they either don’t take seriously, like property crimes, or those that they enable, like murders by the career criminals they freed, that are booming.

Criminal justice reform is not the first time that radical leftists imposed a dramatic policy program with virtually no public explanation of what it was or how it would work. The few times that media talking heads actually asked Democrat officials, like those in Minneapolis, who would deal with crime if the police were no longer around to respond to calls, the responses were nonsensical.

And yet no media outlet was willing to bottom line the agenda of criminal justice reform by admitting that its proponents did not believe that crime needed to be “fought” to begin with.

"If you are a comfortable white person asking to dismantle the police I invite you to reflect: are you willing to stick with it? Will you be calling in three months to ask about garage break-ins? Are you willing to dismantle white supremacy in all systems, including a new system?" Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender tweeted.

What was this new system? No one was willing to discuss what exactly it entailed.

But the system is plain to see. Watch a video of a thug hauling away trash bags full of stolen merchandise from a CVS. Or more videos of porch pirates brazenly walking away with packages. At the local supermarket, staff have been told not to interfere with shoplifters.

The new system abolishes private property by legalizing theft.

It’s a simple proposition that the media refuses to speak out loud because the vast majority of the public would never go along with it. That’s why statements by criminal justice reform politicians and police defunding slogans can never be followed to their logical conclusion.

The new system abolishes private property and treats gang violence as a social problem to be met with wealth redistribution, community intervention, and other means of bribing the thugs.

The crime wave is not a baffling phenomenon, but exactly what the defunders wanted.

Thousands of people have died as a result of a leftist social experiment. And thousands more will go on dying because it’s a lot easier to destroy public safety than it is to restore it.

And that won’t change until we start telling the truth about what’s really happening.

As horrible as the Soros DAs, AOC, and the tip of the spear for criminal justice reform may be, they couldn’t have done their work without the complicity of mainstream Democrats and Republicans. Under the Obama administration, countless Republicans, local and national, jumped on the bandwagon of criminal justice reform contending that our prisons were too full.

Even now Republicans are arguing that they could do a better job of freeing criminals than the Dems. Just like they could do a better job of carrying out all the other leftist political agendas.

Criminal justice reform was never anything other than a stalking horse for the radical transformation of American society by enabling and legalizing crime. The entire gruesome theater of Black Lives Matter was the front for a radical Marxist project that must be stopped.

Or the killing will continue.

After Obama’s obsession with freeing as many Islamic terrorists from Gitmo as possible, the ones who remained were the absolute worst of the worst. Now Biden is setting them loose too.

5 Islamic terrorists, Al Qaeda and allies, have been scheduled for release from custody.

They include Osama bin Laden bodyguards and murderous terrorists with blood on their hands.

Zuhail al-Sharabi had been allegedly trained in “how to function in Western cities” and “reading airline timetables” alongside 9/11 hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi. He also met Khalid al-Mihdhar who, along with Al-Hazmi, was part of the crew that hijacked American Airlines 77 for the attack on the Pentagon.

Al-Sharabi had been part of an expanded version of the September 11 attacks that would have targeted American planes in Southeast Asia; either blowing them up in mid-air or hijacking them to crash into American military bases. That part of the operation was cancelled by Al Qaeda.

As government documents note, “detainee and several other al-Qaida members were designated as suicide operatives in a plot to hijack US air carriers traveling across Southeast Asia” on September 11 and that "he traveled to Southeast Asia as part of the pre-planning for the hijacking plot” where he and his accomplices “gathered information about the security practices and defensive postures for U.S. air carriers".

Al-Sharabi functioned as the “Emir” of an Al Qaeda operation and ran “the al-Nibras guesthouse in Kandahar” where an Al Qaeda figure stayed “during a January 2001 visit to brief Osama bin Laden on the progress of the training for the 11 September 2001 hijackers.”

The report notes that Al-Sharabi had stated that, "the U.S. is going down" and warns that he "maintains his support for extremism and if released would reengage in hostilities".

While the United States had captured a number of the alternate Asia 9/11 hijackers, Obama had already freed three of them, including Dirty Thirty members Mohammed Al Ansi, Abdul Rahman Shalabi, and Abd al Malik Abd al Wahab. Biden is helping out the 4th alternate 9/11 hijacker.

Lee Wolosky, Obama's point man for freeing Jihadists from Gitmo (currently advising Biden on Afghan refugees), recently wrote an editorial falsely claiming that, “our longest war has ended, yet Guantanamo endures” and that "the world seemed to have moved on even more definitively from the era of the war on terror." Democrats may have moved on, but the terrorists haven’t.

Islamic terrorist plots continue to target Americans. While Biden pushes Afghan immigrants and gun control, the second largest mass shooting was carried out in an Orlando nightclub by Omar Mateen, the son of Afghan immigrants, who pledged allegiance to ISIS. Cholo Abdi Abdullah, a Kenyan member of Al-Shabaab, an Al Qaeda ally, will face trial later this year for plotting a 9/11 style attack that included hijacking a plane and crashing it into an American skyscraper.

The war isn’t over, but the Left desperately wants Americans to forget that it’s still going on.

And so Biden is not only releasing the fourth alternate 9/11 Southeast Asia hijacker, but Moath al-Alwi, another Osama bodyguard and member of the Dirty Thirty, whom U.S. documents note, has threatened to kill US personnel" and “made a threat to kill a US debriefer upon his release".

The media however emphasized that he took part in an art project, making sculptures that were displayed at the NYU Law School, which neglected to show off Hitler's watercolors next to them.

Biden is also releasing Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, linked to the terrorist attack on the Paradise Hotel in Africa which killed three Israelis, two of them children, along with ten Kenyans, a missile attack on an Israeli plane, as well as a plot to "attack the Kenyan Anti-Terrorism Headquarters located in Nairobi, and the Mombasa Marathon,with the intent of killing Americans and Israelis”, not to mention, "potential attacks on US and Israeli Embassies".

But, according to his lawyer, Babaju “can quote Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King like teenagers quote Taylor Swift.” Gandhi, King, and Swift could not be reached for comment.

Neither could the victims of the Paradise Hotel attack.

Also set to be released is Guled Hassan Duran, a member of Al Qaeda and a Somali Jihadist group whose successor organization turned into the infamous terrorist group Al-Shabaab.

An assessment noted that the reasons for detaining the Jihadist included the belief that he had "personally surveyed Camp Lemonier, headquarters of CJTF-HOA, for a potential truck bomb attack", and had "participated in the planning of bombings, robbing Ethiopian businessmen in Hargeysa, kidnapping Westerners in Somalia. and shooting down an Ethiopian Airlines jet liner."

The report noted that the Somali “may have assisted an al-Qaeda operative in bombing the Whitesands Hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, and the Coral Key Beach Hotel in Malindi, Kenya.”

Also, "Detainee has stated that he would fight until his death for the AIAI cause."

What are the reasons for releasing him beyond a love for terrorism and a hatred for America?

Camp Lemonier housed a joint task force of the United States Africa Command in Djibouti that was set up in response to the 9/11 attacks and hosted thousands of American and allied forces. A year after the United States set up the base, Duran "conducted reconnaissance of Camp Lemonier" and "expressed interest in seeing where the U.S. military was housed".

Initial plans apparently included "hijacking an aircraft and crashing it into Camp Lemonier" in another 9/11 copycat operation or "conducting an attack against off-base US personnel."

The attack plan finally came around a truck bombing similar to those that had been used to attack American military personnel in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

The "operatives identified a dark red Isuzu water tank truck that delivered water to Camp Lemonier. Subsequently, in December 2003, they agreed on a plan to target Camp Lemonier with an explosives-laden water truck… Detainee stated that a powerful car bomb would be used to blow up a military compound or hardened structure.”

Had the truck bombing succeeded, the casualties could have been horrifying. The Iran-backed Beirut barracks bombings killed 220 Marines in Lebanon and the Iran-backed Khobar Towers bombing killed 19 Air Force personnel. Fortunately the Djibouti plot was disrupted.

Lee Wolosky, Obama’s point man on releasing the terrorists, accused America of racism for locking up these monsters. “If these detainees had been white and not brown or black, is there any realistic chance the United States… would imprison them without charge for decades?”

Duran’s “special group” had also been tied to the murder of Florence Chepkemei.

Chepkemei was an African aid worker. In Wolosky’s racial terms, a “brown or black” person. She was one of a number of aid workers murdered by the Jihadis, including anti-apartheid activists Richard and Enid Eyeington, who taught Nelson Mandela's children, and Annalena Tonelli

When the Jihadis finally faced justice, they were sentenced to death by an African court, which unlike American courts didn't hold them for decades while they pottered around with art projects, read up on Harry Potter, demanded more varied meals, and flirted with their NYU lawyers.

Their defense consisted of quoting the Koran and arguing that, "we should not be killed for killing infidels."

That is the racist genocidal mindset that the defenders of Al Qaeda terrorists collaborate with.

Duran is the first black site "high value" detainee being let loose on the world by the Democrats.

He won't be the last.

Lee Wolosky, Obama's point man on freeing the terrorists, urges Biden to show "the same resolve and leadership" that he had "demonstrated in extricating the United States from Afghanistan."

Biden is certainly doing that. Even while he abandoned Americans to the Taliban, he’s freeing some of the worst of the worst from Guantanamo Bay. It’s a degree of “resolve and leadership” that the Al Qaeda terrorists he is liberating to kill more innocent people can only applaud.

Is there any Islamic terrorist too monstrous and evil for even Biden to free? It’s still a long way to 2024 and there’s plenty of time for us to find out and for him to free them all.

"Dr. King knew the Jim Crow filibuster was a barrier to progress & justice, and that remains true today," Rep. Ayanna Pressley tweeted. "To honor his legacy and claim our place on the right side of history, we must abolish the filibuster."

If this is true, and we must assume that Pressley believes it to be so, she and all Democrats should immediately commit to refusing to make use of the filibuster under any circumstances.

Otherwise they might be kicked out of the Right Side of History Bar & Grill.

It is shameful that over 50 years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a supporter of Alabama Democrat Governor George Wallace some Democrats still continue to utilize the filibuster. Now that the Democrats have officially denounced the filibuster as the work of Jim Crow (even though it actually originated with anti-slavery Whigs like Henry Clay attacking pro-slavery Jacksonians), it’s time for them to live up to their standards and reject the filibuster.

“The Jim Crow Filibuster Must Go,” the Center for American Progress hectored. "End the Jim Crow Filibuster Now," MoveOn clamored.

Martin Luther King III demanded that Senator Sinema see to it that "the Jim Crow filibuster does not stand in the way" of Democrat plans for permanent majority rule. Because if there's anything his father stood for, it was the unambiguous right of the majority to rule over the minority.

Obama, as usual, got all of this started when he insisted that, "if all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic".

Confusingly, Democrats keep relying on this Jim Crow relic, most recently when they blocked Senator Ted Cruz’s sanctions on Putin’s European pipeline possibly because, to play by their rules, Vladimir has tapes of them with micturating prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room.

It’s unfathomable that at a time when we are courageously toppling the statues of anyone who lived in the 19th century (never mind the 18th century) that Democrats cling to this vestige of Jim Crow in order to protect Russian pipelines, illegal aliens and abortion, and also to stop Senator Tim Scott’s police reform legislation. Truly the Dem filibuster is a relic of Jim Crow.

Democrats, who have called this dreadful issue to our attention, must lead the way.

When they are in the minority (which is likely to happen quite soon) they should make it clear that they will refuse on principle to make use of the filibuster to oppose Republican legislation.

To do otherwise would make them complicit in Jim Crow, systemic racism, and other social justice buzzwords that I am sure they were wholly and entirely sincere about invoking.

The Democrats must make it clear that they will have no part in the Jim Crow filibuster starting today. Even if they can’t abolish it, they must show their moral superiority by refusing to trifle with it. If there’s anything that the civil rights movement teaches us, it’s that the minority must never object to the rule of the majority. And by refusing to employ the Jim Crow filibuster, they will live up to the true legacy of the civil rights movement by abandoning minority rights.

It’s what Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted. According to them.

Only the most ridiculous racists would believe that there is any value whatsoever in allowing minorities to obstruct the will of the majority and as we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, we should be mindful of his words in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, “A just law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey”.

Actually, King wrote that, “An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.” But, much like his “content of character” quote and the filibuster, that’s inconvenient. So we’ll just get rid of it.

The Democrats, as the momentary majority, would like to bind Republicans by the filibuster, without being bound by it. And then once out of power, they would like to revive the filibuster. And then opposition to the filibuster will be the new Jim Crow after the filibuster was the old Jim Crow. That fits King’s definition of an unjust law that a tyranny “does not make binding on itself”.

And if the Democrats want to disprove it, all they have to do is reject the Jim Crow Filibuster.

If the filibuster really is, as Common Dreams, the Sierra Club, the Associated Press, the For the People Project, Robert Reich, the Democracy Initiative, Common Cause, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, and Senator Brian Schatz falsely claim, the "Jim Crow Filibuster", how can Democrats possibly justify continuing to make use of it?

Would Democrats make use of Jim Crow water fountains or buses? How can they use the Jim Crow Filibuster then?

If Senate Democrats won't listen to these idiots and front groups for radical billionaires, won't they listen to Rob Reiner who pleaded with senators to, "get rid of the Jim Crow filibuster, and save Democracy. We’re watching it slip away before our eyes." As an oppressed white California millionaire famous for playing a television buffoon, he knows what he’s talking about.

Democrats must live up to their principles and turn their backs on the Jim Crow Filibuster.

Otherwise people will begin to suspect that they’re pathological liars exploiting the traumas of one of the most difficult eras in our history in order to seize power and make some money.

And that would not be very nice.

From this day forward, if a Democrat makes use of the Jim Crow filibuster, he or she must be forever known as a Jim Crow Democrat. After having given themselves ample warning of its racism, their determination to continue making use of the filibuster can be seen as nothing less than complicity in the systemic racism that has characterized their party since its origins.

This is no laughing matter.

Democrats have shamelessly weaponized racism on both sides of the table. They have shown absolutely no hesitation in hurling the worst possible accusations of racism if there’s something in it for them. And they’ve done it in the most nakedly hypocritical ways possible. The only thing to do is to hold them accountable for their talking points even after they’re no longer convenient.

Or especially if they’re no longer convenient.

Since they’ve decided that it’s the Jim Crow Filibuster, let it be so every time they use it even when they suddenly change their minds and decide that the Jim Crow Filibuster should really be known as the Martin Luther King Filibuster and that employing it is a true tribute to his legacy.

“Words matter,” as Obama said a long time ago before he decided that they didn’t after all.